I beat this game on its true ending last night (bad ending the night before). I did enjoy it a lot, and it feels very nice to play, with some absolutely gorgeous pixel art and animation and fun level design.
The game has some design flaws in my opinion, though. It's very heavily inspired by Dark Souls, yes, but I think the game needed to put players in more difficult positions to fully utilize their combat skills and experiences. The stage designs are varied and prove to be a fun challenge, but I think where this falls flat are the regular enemy encounters - at the start they're hopping, dodging, blocking and even targeting your position, and you have some with super armour on that can withstand more of your attacks and crush you. Later in the game, though, they get much easier, with less aggressive attack patterns, weaker attacks and no real incentive to fight a lot of them (given that you can jump, a thing that doesn't exist in the Souls series, you have much less reason to confront, dodge or roll out of the way when it comes to enemies as you can just avoid them completely, and unlike Souls not many of them - if any at all - bother chasing you) and it's really easy to lock them in hitstun until they're dead, or worse yet one-shot them with your bow. I don't think it's awful gameplay at all, but considering the game's obvious inspiration and potential to improve on it (movement and combat is much faster than Souls so it could be even more intense) it seems like a really missed opportunity to exploit it. Thankfully, though, bosses are much better, and this is where the Souls formula really shines - knowing when to attack and avoid, not being greedy and reading their movement, these encounters are the game's highlights. Unfortunately, though, the difficulty of the bosses is inconsistent - early bosses like
and
proved to be very challenging in a satisfying way, and later in the game the
encounter is pretty tough too. Everyone else was a fair amount easier, and the final boss was an absolute joke.
Maybe the higher difficulties will alleviate this? If it's just dealing higher damage then I doubt I'll bother, but I did enjoy the game enough and I would recommend it to anyone who wants a Metroid-like experience to kill some time.